autopilipinas.com

The Volkswagen Beetle was not Adolph Hitler’s idea. But he was involved.

Even while Ferdinand Porsche was designing fantastic Mercedes touring cars and racers, long before Hitler was elected to power in Germany, he was conjuring up schemes to mass-produce an affordable car.

Born in 1875, Porsche was already acquiring legendary status when he joined Jacob Lohner & Co. in 1898 and was nearly a certifiable genius when he left that company to go to work for Astro-Daimler (maker of Mercedes) in 1905. And it was his series of wildly successful racing cars and the astounding Mercedes SSK road cars while at Daimler that brought him world recognition. When he left that company to start his own design bureau in 1931, he was Germany’s best and best-known engineer; and maybe the world’s.

Daimler was never enthusiastic about building a small car and Porsche always had been. So, newly free, Porsche went out looking for a company who’d buy his idea for a popular small car. Motorcycle maker Zündapp approached him first and Porsche worked on a rear-engine car powered by a radial engine. But the radial engine’s inherent problems were insurmountable and the project was cancelled. So Porsche moved on to another motorcycle manufacturer, NSU.

At NSU, Porsche developed the “Type 32″ with a rear-mounted, air-cooled flat four (similar to aircraft engines Porsche had designed at Daimler) and a steel body that at least suggested the Beetle yet to be. But even though prototypes of the Type 32 were built during 1934, it turned out that NSU was barred from producing cars because of an existing contract with Italy’s Fiat. So the Type 32 was stillborn.

Hitler became chancellor in 1933 and at 1934’s Berlin Motor Show made a speech promoting development of just the sort of car Porsche wanted to build, and afterwards arranged a meeting with Porsche. From that meeting came the general outline for the Beetle and a commitment to build it. Prototypes quickly took shape and in 1938 the cornerstone was laid for a new factory to build the car in the new town of “KdF-Stadt” (called Wolfsburg now).

Hitler called the new car the “KdF-Wagen” — the “Strength Through Joy Car” — after the Nazi-led KdF (Kraft durch Freude) movement that was supposed to look after the working people. Hitler’s name for the car wouldn’t last and, at the cost of the most destructive war in history, neither would Hitler.

But Porsche’s passion, the Beetle itself, would survive into the 21st century — easily and by far, the longest production run of any single car design ever. It would evolve constantly, but always be the Beetle. Though “Beetle” was never the car’s official name.

The War Years (1941-1944)

Ferdinand Porsche hated the name KdF-Wagen (he naturally preferred Volkswagen, the informal name under which the car had been developed). But even when only prototypes were skittering about in 1938, the nickname “Beetle” was already being applied by the public (the name appeared in a New York Times article that year). Considering the car’s shape, how could it be called anything else?

Known by Porsche as the “Type 60,” the very first production-ready Beetle debuted at the 1939 Berlin Motor Show a few months before German troops invaded Poland. As every subsequent air-cooled Beetle would be, the Type 60 rode on a chassis that was basically a stamped steel pan with the 1.0-liter (actually 985 cubic centimeters) overhead valve, flat-four engine located in the back making just 23.5 horsepower. Paired with that engine was a four-speed manual, non-synchromesh gearbox that sent power to the rear wheels that hung at the end of some rather treacherous swing axles. The front end used a trailing arm and torsion bar system that was rugged, if not particularly supple, and the steering was by a worm gear. The braking system consisted of four dinky, mechanically operated drums.

The scheme surrounding the car was that ordinary Germans could pay five reichmarks a week for savings stamps that could eventually be turned over for a Beetle. But no Beetles were ever delivered to anyone with a full book of stamps.

The German army needed a light utility vehicle, and that need would overwhelm the Beetle during the war years. The Type 62 Kübelwagen was basically a lightly modified Beetle chassis fitted with a new four-door convertible body and wearing 18- instead of the Beetle’s 16-inch wheels for better ground clearance. The Kübelwagen’s distinctive shape would become as identified with the Wehrmacht as the Jeep was with the American army.

Even though the factory’s production would be dedicated primarily to Type 62 and Type 82 Kübelwagens, and the amphibious Type 128 and Type 166 Schwimmwagens during the war, there were still a few Beetles being turned out for use, almost exclusively, by Nazi party officials. In fact, between July 11, 1941 (the date when production officially began) and August 7, 1944 when production ceased under pressure of Allied bombing, 630 Beetle sedans and 13 cabriolet convertibles were built. During roughly that same period, somewhere around 50,000 Kübelwagens and 14,000 Schwimmwagens were built.

With the war over in May of 1945, the Beetle could have sunk into obscurity as an artifact of the darkest chapter in German history. No one could have predicted it would instead lead the industrial renaissance of a democratic West Germany.

Oh yeah, at this point, no one had yet formally used the name “Volkswagen.”

Rebuilding (1945-1949)

Germany was in desperate shape after the war and cleaved into four sectors, each administered by one of the victorious allied nations. While the American, British and French sectors would be recombined to form West Germany, the Soviet sector became the police state of East Germany. Fortunately for automotive posterity, the KdF-Wagen factory, which was in relatively good shape for a factory that had been bombed, was in the British sector.

After surveying the damage, the British military government saw potential in the factory and the remaining stock of half-finished cars and sundry pieces. And the government itself needed transportation. So in August 1945, the British ordered up 20,000 Beetles. Also around that time, and since the KdF movement vanished along with the Nazis, the name of the town of KdF-Stadt was changed to Wolfsburg, the KdF-Wagen became, once again (and for the first time officially) the Volkswagen, and a new company, Volkswagen GmbH (managed in trust by the British until 1949), was formed to build the Beetle.

The very first post-war Beetles were essentially leftover Kübelwagen chassis fitted with the Beetle sedan bodywork (Kübelwagen bodies had been built in Berlin and that tooling was destroyed during the war). Production started in December 1945 and by the end of the month 55 cars had been built. These first cars were powered by a 1.1-liter (1131cc) version of the flat four originally developed for the Schwimmwagen.

Despite intense material shortages, production continued into 1946 with few changes to the Beetle. There’s a lot of variation in those ‘46 Beetles, however, as the factory cobbled together things like headliners and door panels from whatever materials it could scrounge together. Despite the onerous conditions, the 10,000th Beetle came off the line in October of that year.

Export sales started in 1947 when 56 Beetle sedans were sent to the Netherlands. Bringing in critical foreign currency, 4,464 Beetles found homes in some place other than West Germany that year. Also that year the engine output leapt from 24 to a throaty 25 hp. Hey, it was a start.

The big change at Volkswagen for 1948 wasn’t in the Beetle itself (though engine output skyrocketed to 30 hp), but in the management of the company as Heinrich Nordhoff took over running the plant. Transferring over from Opel, Nordhoff was no fan of the early Beetles and was convinced that it needed to become more refined if the company was to survive. Nordhoff was the driving force behind the push for constant improvement without abandoning the basic design that would define Volkswagen in the public’s mind.

While a few Beetles had come over to America along with returning servicemen as early as 1947, the first official exports to the continent started in 1949 as VW introduced a Deluxe “export model” Beetle. The Deluxe had such extravagant equipment as more color choices, chrome bumpers, headlight rings, door handles and hubcaps (initially the Standard model was also sold in the U.S.).

The ‘49 Beetle sedan featured a new instrument panel with a single gauge in front of the driver and, in a leap of faith, deleted the hole for a hand crank to get the engine going. But the biggest change in the line was the introduction of a Karmann-built convertible — which would last longer in the American market than even the sedan.

Already the Beetle was getting a little bit better every year.